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Tools of growth

There is a school of thought on managing growth - you need good managers to manage it, ideally the best managers we can get, right? As we are building the world class organization, we are told by our advisors, whom we love and extremely grateful to, that we need to create an org structure, a matrix structure perhaps, proper policies, and the industrialized processes. But before we fall into the common pattern of adding more people..

Tools we need to choose

Internal instant communications

Slack has taken startup world by storm, it managed to achieve the unachievable - it replaced a lot of email conversations, so it deserves careful consideration.

Here is my past experience with Slack

We used Slack a lot before and although it is extremely well crafted and feature rich, I felt it had significant issues, so before we start using it we need to consider them carefully and institute policies to address them:

it promotes group chat and becomes super super super chatty - I wasted hours and days and felt helpless
trying to follow group conversations, especially if were not part of them and are trying to catchup, as on Slack there is no division into threads, just topics, so 5 conversations become intertwined.
i. The alternative we are considering for long form conversations is https://nodebb.org/
ii. Simon: Mark has installed NodeBB on http://forum.tradle.io for experimentation, it needs a lot of customization. re:email support, notifications, replacing nodebb branding with ours, figuring out internal forums vs external forums (and the ability to move an existing thread between them)

Slack app on Mac was (is it still?) a major CPU killer, not always, but often. I had to stop it, and then would miss messages.

Slack is costly if you need access to old messages (beyond 10K limit). It is $12 per user.

Does anyone know remedies or can suggest how to handle above issues?

Best parts of Slack

instant communications - the forum (e.g. NodeBB) is no match, thus we will always relegate to skype chat or messaging

presence - it is very important for a team that is on all continents to know if you can bother someone - as you see them online/away/offline

multitude of integrations with other tools (e.g. you can get notified on slack regarding customer issue, technical problem, etc.)

Support (customer and developer):

instant: slack group

async (delayed response): [NodeBB] forum

tickets/issues: issue tracker provides a lot more structured functionality than the forum. Github issue tracker is quite rudimental and requires understanding which module is at fault, which might be ok for developers but not for customer facing complaints and suggestions.

Sales tools

Event planning

shall we use the CRM for that? It could help with collecting all the leads.

card scanner: today I use CamCard app for scanning business cards, which I get by the dozens. I am told Evernote is miles better, and even connects to LinkedIn, but could not get it to work on my android.

sadly we need to print business cards. Ideally they should have person's photo, and [Tradle] QR code, to connect electronically using Tradle app.

Newsletter

Ghost blog allows to get connected to a newsletter. TODO.

Many companies use Mailchimp, shall we?

Marketing

This section needs a lot of work, as we have not started our strategic marketing yet

Tracking mentions

We need to know when press writes about us and we need to know when to react on social media mentions. Today we use http://mention.net, should we continue?